Customer News

It’s a blustery, wet day here in California. It feels like the perfect time to share a couple new winter themed stories with you. 

We had a request for winter story suggestions, so I thought I’d pop in and share a quick list with you before the Thanksgiving holiday. 

Here are some stories you might consider sharing with your communities in the coming months:

 Winter Stories

When we developed LibraryCall, one of our goals was to create a repository where you could share great content with each other. That idea has proven to be trickier to execute than we originally imagined. In creating the Storytime Commons, it has been important to make sure all stories are copyright-free (or licensed to us appropriately), that your library’s intellectual property (your recordings, adaptations, and original content) is protected, and that the recordings we add include metadata that will be useful to all LibraryCall users.

We have some new outreach tools to share with you! We know that one of the challenges of promoting dial-a-story is that the families who would most benefit from the service tend to have limited internet and library access. You may have found that promoting the service on your website or inside the library is not reaching as many people as you'd like. To help you spread the word about your service more widely, we now offer several templates that you can use to capitalize on the reach of your local media and schools.

New publications

 Have you scheduled Spanish recordings from the Storytime Commons? If so, you’re probably familiar with the voice of our Spanish language reader, Adilene Estrada-Huerta. We thought you might enjoy learning a bit more about her background.

We've been thinking about all the creative ways you're using your LibraryCall services. Of course, the classic dial-a-story model of sharing stories with children is a keeper, and many of you are using that model to successfully connect with families.

Today we have a couple quick tips for our Dial-A-Story Studio customers:

 Tip #1: Use LibraryCall’s story transcripts to make your job easier

 If you’re concerned about copyright but you don’t have time to search for and adapt public domain stories, why not use our stories? Of course, you can always schedule our recordings, but if you want to feature the voices of your own staff, simply log into the Storytime Commons, open up the LibraryCall story of your choice, and grab the transcript on the bottom of the page. Most of the English and Spanish stories in the Commons are adapted, translated and written by LibraryCall. They are owned by LibraryCall, but free for you to use as customers! We just ask that you attribute the stories to us in your introductions. The transcripts are currently available in plain text, but we’re happy to provide nicer read-along copies of any story upon request. 

If you need some fall or Halloween-inspired stories to round out your Dial-A-Story service this month, here are some titles to check out in the Storytime Commons (log-in required to open story links):

 Spooky Stories 

It’s officially fall! The days may be getting shorter, but today we have bright news: our new web widget designs are ready for you to use and share! 

Here you can see an example of the vertical design embedded into our website: https://librarycall.com/services/storytime-direct#demo 

New features include: